alone. He expects me to constantly fill the well, which is why I’m continuing my education. But all art is inspiration for my own work. I would hate to miss this opportunity to study the masters who came before me, even though their disciplines are different from my own.”
He cocked his head in a small nod, relenting, and waved toward the hall where they had entered. He took her first to a music room where the brass pipes of an organ reached toward the sixteen-foot ceilings. A wall of double doors opened into the adjacent ballroom, which was straight out of Beauty and the Beast.
“Wow.”
“In answer to your earlier question, we host charity events and the odd film crew shooting a period piece.”
“I love those.” She moved into the center of the parquet floor and turned a slow circle, taking in the white walls with gilded trim, blue velvet curtains over the leaded windows and the chandeliers dripping with crystal. “What a dizzying place to live.”
“It’s an expensive obligation. I’d be fine with a modest apartment.”
She bet his definition of modest was a lot different from the place she occupied. Even so, this was only one of his many homes. What were the rest like?
“I’m a romantic, I’m afraid,” she confessed as he led her out to a hallway of portraits and vases that were so colorful and ornate they should have been gaudy but were perfectly tasteful in this surrounding. There was a chill in the air, though, and a faint scent of disuse. “I never want to hear that it’s actually cold as Hades to live here, even in summer. Or that back in the day, they had to use outhouses and drank bad water.”
“Mmm. I don’t know whether you’ll be pleased with this room or not, then.” He took her into an enormous dining room. It was very stately and beautiful, but distinctly chilly and empty. It held only a circular table with eight chairs upon an enormous rug. The windows looked on to the front grounds. “There’s a compartment in the floor where a table for forty is kept. At different times, people have hidden there.”
“Like you? Playing hide-and-seek when you were young?” She came from a big, lively family, but recalled at the last second that he had lost his only sibling, an older brother, when they’d been young men.
“Or you meant in wartime?” she hurried to add, trying to smooth over her gaffe.
“Both of those.” His expression remained inscrutable. “And the odd lover.”
“Oh, I do enjoy hearing about skeletons in the family closet,” she said with relish.
“Never found one of those. They always seemed to get out.” He sipped the drink he carried.
She chuckled, more out of relief since his dry sense of humor gave her the impression he was relaxing a fraction. Not that she would call him affable. Not ever and certainly not to his face.
“They must be a consequence of arranged marriages. Lovers, I mean.” She was teasing him a little, but also wondering if he really planned to succumb to such a thing.
“A consequence of being human, I’d say.” He wasn’t standing that close, but she suddenly felt the heat of his body. The lazy half-lidded look he gave her made her pulse thrum in her throat.
Would he resort to that? she wondered. If he succumbed to an arranged marriage?
She pushed the rim of her glass against her unsteady mouth, wondering what he would think if she told him she was a virgin at twenty-four. That she had made a pact at thirteen with her cousin to wait until they found a man they could truly love. It had partly been inspired their grandmother’s great love for Istvan, but for Rozalia, it was more personal. She needed to be sure she gave herself to a man who wasn’t secretly wishing she was Gisella.
“You come from a love match, I presume?” he asked, leading her into a smaller breakfast room that had a view of the back garden. It was still a showpiece, but much warmer and lived-in with fresh flowers and cut-crystal salt and pepper shakers on the lace tablecloth.
“My parents are deliriously in love,” she said with a grin of affection, moving to the windows that likely caught the morning sun, making for a relaxed start to the day. “But I will concede such a thing to be impractical.” She threw that over her shoulder, then tilted her head to reconsider her words. “Actually, my parents are impractical people, so I don’t know if one correlates to the other.”
“Impractical how?” He came to stand next to her and pointed out the window to the hexagonal windows that formed the roof of a squat, round building. “Like that sort of folly?”
“Why is it a folly? What is it?”
“A conservatory. My mother insists the staff keep it up, even though we can buy orchids for a fraction of the cost of heating that monster.”
“May I see inside it?”
He drew her into a hall where casual jackets hung over a boot bench, then opened the door she suspected was referred to as the service entrance. Faint kitchen noises came from behind a closed door. Looking along as she went down the outside steps, she saw a formal veranda obscured by a privacy hedge.
He was showing her the “home” part of his house, which gave her a sense of privilege and made her warm to him even though he remained very aloof.
Cool evening air surrounded them as they crossed to the door of the conservatory. She hugged her arms across her chest, hiding the way her nipples pushed against the fabric of her T-shirt, glancing nervously to see he’d noticed.
If anything, his attention made her nerve endings tingle all the harder, becoming even more sensitized and receptive. She had never reacted so elementally to any man before in her life. She kept wondering if this was how her grandmother had felt around Istvan—enthralled and ensnared. Helpless to powerful attraction. Desperate, even. Like me, want me. She didn’t want to be that needy, ever, but couldn’t hide from herself that he stoked that compulsion in her.
They entered the conservatory. It was humid as the tropics in here. She inhaled the earthy, dank undertones layered with heady floral aromas and a fragrance of citrus and herbs.
“I love the smell.”
His nostrils twitched and his chest expanded. He grew pensive. “I haven’t been in here for years.”
“I would be in here every day if it was mine.” She looked to the glass ceiling partially obscured by the fat leaves of exotic jungle plants. “This must be amazing in the winter. Oh, butterflies! How magical. You really are the luckiest person to have this.”
“There were birds once. Tomatoes were protected in that section and berries there.” He pointed to some cold frames. “My brother and I got into them. Left the doors open. The birds got into the berries and the cat got after the birds. We were banned after that.”
She smiled, heart squeezed by the memory. It sounded so beautifully human. She wanted to hear more, but his expression stiffened and closed up as though he regretted sharing.
“We grew a garden every summer,” she said. “My mother always put up her own preserves—even though you can buy canned peaches off the shelf for half the price.” She teasingly threw his words back at him.
“She didn’t work?”
